Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Adult Onset
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Knopf Canada


Ann-Marie MacDonald is an award-winning actor, playwright, broadcaster and author. Given the range and depth of her talents, readers should not be surprised to read something completely original in Adult Onset. Although there are some similarities with her two previous best-selling novels Fall On Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, namely a father in the Royal Canadian Air Force and a mother of Lebanese descent, MacDonald’s new release does not span decades.

Instead Adult Onset takes place in real-time, focusing on just 7 days in the life of forty-something stay-at-home mom Mary Rose MacKinnon, also known as Mister. In this typical week, which starts out relatively peacefully, Mary Rose toils alone with her 4-year-old son and willful 2-year-old daughter while her partner is out of town. For unexplained reasons, she is suddenly seized with discomfort and then pain.

As a child, she had a medical condition that she has long since grown out of. The adult onset of her pain, as she slowly discovers, is the resurfacing of long-buried early childhood trauma that she has not yet come to terms with. The reader follows Mister’s every thought, slipping back to her vivid childhood memories, as she tries to pinpoint the source of her malaise.

Raising young children is, after all, when most of us are likely to revisit our childhoods. Mister’s parents, Dunc and Dolly, may not seem ideal by the standards of today’s helicopter parents. They are tough as parents were in the day when it was believed that a coddled child would not fare well. Mister is also a child who was born in Germany, where her father was stationed. Dolly, like many military wives, had to come to grips with the strain of raising her young children far from her family, while grieving the loss of two other children.

I identified very closely with Mister, as I had my two children late in life and was familiar with the obsessive thoughts about banishing BPA-laden plastic containers and finding organic ingredients year round for my children. I was also haunted by the resurgence of my own childhood trauma, which MacDonald portrays perfectly, so perfectly in fact that I was convinced that this book was a memoir.

Rather than using trauma as a literary device to propel the story, the author opted for a realistic, intellectually honest portrayal of trauma, a process of two steps forward one step back, until Mister has her epiphany. There is other trauma in Adult Onset that I found equally as moving. As a young adult, Mister came out to her parents in the early 1980s.

Although straight folk often equate the eighties with sexual openness, Dunc and Dolly are anything but accepting of Mister’s sexual orientation. While it is easy for outsiders to dismiss this as mere bigotry, MacDonald takes us in for a close-up of Mister’s relationship with her parents and shows us where the pain lies, particularly in relation to her father.

He is not horrible or narrow-minded. Instead, he is a warm, intelligent, loving father who just can’t accept his daughter’s homosexuality, which he sees as a lifestyle choice and not a matter of identity. MacDonald does a beautiful job of balancing the story with Dolly and Dunc’s acceptance and rejection of their daughter’s homosexuality, something that afflicts Mister’s entire adult life.

 According to MacDonald, Adult Onset was the most interior of her three novels and the hardest one to write. She describes it as the third book in a trilogy, and while it may appear to be a memoir, the author has said that it is about a character who is very similar to herself, living in a parallel universe.

 I was taken aback by this book for many reasons. As an army brat who grew up in Kingston, Ontario, where many of Mister’s childhood memories are set, MacDonald describes the town exactly as I remember it, right down to her father’s drive to RMC in the morning. In fact, I lived a few streets away from Our Lady of Lourdes, a Catholic grade school in Kingston where a clear-eyed nun identifies Mary Rose MacKinnon as a gifted child.

My personal connection to the book aside, this is a beautiful, spellbinding story. Although some may argue that it doesn’t have quite the same entertainment value as Fall On Your Knees, I would argue that Adult Onset will be one of her most enduring books. Let’s hope that there will be many, many more.

This has been crossposted at Montreal's Rover Arts.

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Review of Lily and Taylor by Elise Moser

Review of Lily and Taylor by Elise Moser

When the Lily and Taylor meet at a local high school, they discover that they have something in common--both their mothers had been in car crashes. While Taylor's mother died, Lily's mother survived, but the head injuries she sustained often require Lily to act as the parent.

Taylor, too, has lived through more than just the death of her mother. After her mother's death, she goes to live with her older sister and her violent partner. Taylor witnesses the escalation in violence until one day her older sister is killed, forcing Taylor to live with her grandparents in a new town and be a surrogate mother to Mason, her sister's 5-year-old son.

Moving to a new town has an upside for Taylor. It means that she is far away from Devon, her intense and controlling boyfriend. Just as Taylor begins to flourish at her new high school, Devon shows up with a friend and insists on taking Taylor for a ride. Lily hops in at the last minute, and the four of them go for a drive that no one will soon forget.

Lily and Taylor is the raw account of two teenage girls negotiating a far from perfect world. In spite of their traumatic pasts and weighty adult responsibilities, the two strike up a fast and furious friendship--something to sustain them through their difficult moments and add some much needed light to their daily lives.

Author Moser takes plenty of risks with Lily and Taylor, never shying away from the realities and darkness of domestic violence. While this is fine fiction, it also provides an eerily accurate depiction of an abusive relationship as it ebbs and flows. This was an intense read, one that I could not put down. 

Lily and Taylor is considered a Young Adult (YA) book, but people of all ages will find some food for thought in this compelling Thelma and Louise-style adventure.

This review has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.


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Bombay Wali and other stories

Bombay Wali and other stories

Bombay Wali and other stories
Veena Gokhale

A former Bombay journalist, Veena Gokhale has penned her first collection of 12 short stories set almost entirely in India. While her stories set in Bombay will impart a genuine taste and flavour of India familiar to Indophiles, there is a definite departure from traditional India in this collection, giving a sense that change is in the air. The author throws in a few surprises, such as a story set in Japan in the last third of the book, serving as a type of aesthetic contrast, in addition to a tale about a young Canadian woman who finds moving spiritual enlightenment in Kathmandu. For anyone who loves stories about the Indian subcontinent, this collection offers some gems that are both evocative and visually pleasing.

The title story, “Bombay Wali,” also the collection’s longest, brings together a number of young professional women eking out an existence in Bombay. Renuka’s dreams are shattered when she has her bag slashed and money stolen outside a bank. Too ashamed to tell her father, she entertains the idea of robbing a bank, a plan suggested by her friend Gulnar on a girls’ night out. In desperation, Renuka agrees to take part. For their disguise, six burqas are purchased, and then the plans abruptly change. This leads to a less than satisfying ending to an otherwise original and engrossing tale. “Bombay Wali” is a welcome shift from the traditional portrayal of Indian women.

Equally audacious is “the Room,” which opens with a young couple, Suj and Vikram, smoking an illicit substance. As their relationship becomes more intimate, Suj resists the pressure to take a key for a room from Vikram’s unsavoury friend so that the couple might be alone. Although Suj is portrayed as more sexually open than her friends, as the reader witnesses, the stakes are still high for even the most minor displays of public affection.

My favourite in the collection is “Zindagi Itefaq Hai” (Life is Chance). Vishwanath Iyer is an investigative journalist at The Disquieter, a small-time Bombay rag. As fate would have it, page two of his report, which contains a key quote, is blown out the window and into the alleyway. Unable to retrieve his page two, Vish rushes to the station where his source, a judge, is catching a train. Both humorous and realistic, this story is easy to visualize, “The station was a tide of bodies, a cacophony of sounds – human and mechanical, a solid flow of heat-resistant energy. Nevertheless, the announcer’s steady voice, talking alternatively in Marathi, Hindi and English, managed to prevail over the chaos.” In spite of its somewhat weak ending, “Zindagi Itefaq Hai” feels like the beginning of a very entertaining full-length novel.

Other noteworthy stories include “the Tea Drinker” about an adolescent boy who befriends a rich social outcast and “Freire Stopped in Bombay,” which details the ravages of hunger on a poor student who is too proud to borrow money. In addition, despite its pedestrian title, “Middle Age Jazz and Blues” is the most beautiful story in the collection. At a jazz concert, middle-aged single Feroza is struck by the vision of the love of her life, who died tragically.

As is usually the case, some stories are not as interesting as others. However, in spite of some vague references to “things” and “stuff,” a handful of heavy adverbs and some unconventional dialogue tags, Veena Gokhale shows genuine promise as a short story writer and future novelist. Let’s hope she chooses to write more about the Bombay newspaper world.


This has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.



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Gay Dwarves of America by Anne Fleming

Gay Dwarves of America by Anne Fleming

There are a lot of great writers in Canada, yet there seems to be little meritocracy. While some great writers are widely promoted, others rarely get the attention they deserve. This is the case of the inventive, unique and moving Gay Dwarves of America (GDA) by Anne Fleming.

True, it could be that GDA is a collection of short stories, not always the first thing people reach for when they read. Or, as the title suggests, some of the stories are unconventional, even outlandish, maybe not exactly what everyone might be in the mood for. Nevertheless, the reader will be generously rewarded with this refreshingly original collection of short stories. Fleming strikes that fine balance between humour and realism, reeling us in with a few laughs only to show us a more serious issue we might never have considered.

The nine-story collection contains a wide variety of tales, from the stellar and almost mainstream "Thorn-blossoms" about an eccentric hockey mom who must contend with her once ambitious journalist mother now stricken with Alzheimer's, to the experimental and self-explanatory, "Thirty-One One Word Stories."

In the middle of the spectrum, there are stories about a boy on a unicycle, a bearded parasitologist named Edna and a musical about a bunch of wannabe artists working in inventory at the back of an outdoor equipment store. This story includes a chorus of cashiers and of course (?), a love triangle with the cuckold in a coma.Yes, this is a laugh-out-loud book, but it also elicits a range of other emotions.

The title story, "Gay Dwarves of America," is about two college roommates who, on a whim, set up a chat room for gay men with dwarfism. However, when one of the roommates receives a serious email from a mother who suspects that her son, a little person, is gay, a distance develops between the two friends.

My favourite, "Puke Diary" is about the funny and harrowing events surrounding each family member's experience with vomiting. This even includes an entry on Sarah, the family cat. My least favourite was the "Backstock: the Musical." Although original, I found it long and had to restart it a few times.

GDA is not a quick read and is best enjoyed over an extended period of time, and preferably not on your commute to work. The conspicuous lime green jacket attracted quite a few smiles and inquisitive looks on the metro. Or was it my giggling?

Anne Fleming's stories have been widely published in literary journals, and she has been shortlisted for both the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award. That said, although GDA might not be considered mainstream fiction, I'm still surprised that it didn't generate more buzz. Fleming is an original talent that shouldn't be missed.

This review has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.


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Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz

Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz

As promised, here is my review of a book that I wanted to like but didn't, as it appeared in the Globe & Mail on Easter weekend 2013.

Bone & Bread
Saleema Nawaz
House of Anansi

Saleema Nawaz burst onto the Canadian literary scene in 2008 with Mother Superior, a widely praised collection of short stories. “My Three Girls,” a story from the collection, won the Journey Prize, while several other stories were published in established literary journals across the country. Bone & Bread, Nawaz’s first full-length novel, is based on the characters in “Bloodlines,” also a story in Mother Superior.

In Bone & Bread, Beena and her younger sister Sadhana live in a tiny apartment above a bagel store in Montreal’s Mile End. Their father, Vishram Singh, the bagel shop owner, dies suddenly, leaving the business to his younger and more traditional Sikh brother, Harinder. The Singh family in India had disowned their eldest son because of his marriage to a white American woman, Beena and Sadhana’s mother, in spite of her conversion to Sikhism.

After the father’s death, their apartment is set ablaze by neo-Nazis, and Sadhana soon shows signs of obsessive compulsive disorder. Tragedy strikes again when the mother dies, leaving the two young teens in the care of Harinder, the girls’ only living relative in Canada. Within a year, Sadhana is hospitalized for anorexia, an illness she battles her whole short life, while Beena finds herself pregnant. The child’s father, Ravi, a bagel shop employee, is nowhere to be found.

Beena tells their story from the present as an adult living in Ottawa with her now 18-year-old son Quinn. Sadhana, the actress, dancer and political activist, has died, and Beena must return to Montreal and empty her apartment. In the process, she uncovers evidence that raises suspicions about the circumstances surrounding her sister’s death. She also discovers that Sadhana had secretly contacted Ravi, a rising right-wing political star.

Bone & Bread is ambitious with easily enough material for two novels. Nawaz successfully portrays a strong yet tumultuous bond between the two sisters, and the author is equally adept at showing the extreme demands of caring for a loved one with anorexia. However, the economy of words and razor-sharp prose of Mother Superior are not to be found in this novel. Instead, there is effusive detail that adds little depth to the story and does not advance the plot. “She sent us an invitation in the mail, on crisp, cream-coloured cardstock, neatly handwritten in feathery script she could only produce with her fountain pen. Turquoise ink,” writes Nawaz of Sadhana’s preparations for a party that would serve merely to contrast the two sisters’ lifestyles. Most sentences are as heavily wrought.

Then there is the issue of the baffling similes and metaphors, leaving the reader momentarily distracted by what exactly is being evoked, “regret has simply become the shadow I would cast if I stood in the sun.” These distractions are unwelcome, especially when the storyline is confusing. With the narrative switching often from the backstory to Beena in the present reminiscing about the past, the novel needs all the coherence it can muster.

However, even these problems might have been overlooked if the author had chosen to show rather than tell so much of the story. The result is language that prevents the reader from experiencing the action first hand. Nawaz writes, “I sat back, watching Sadhana animate the conversation, expounding in her desultory way to Quinn, drawing him out, taking obvious pleasure, as she always did, in his quick mind, his willingness to listen.” Something as simple as dialogue might have made this scene clearer and more accessible to the reader.

While I was not immediately aware of the problems in Bread & Bone, I eventually realized that I was putting the book down every few pages to catch my breath and make better sense of it. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to pick it up again.

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The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier

The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier

This review was initially published in the Globe and Mail.

The Last Runaway
Tracy Chevalier
Dutton
p.302

Author of the bestselling Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier has set her seventh book in her native United States, for the first time. The novelist, who has lived in Britain for 30 years, has chosen to write about the tumultuous pre-Civil War period.

Honor Bright is a modest, taciturn Quaker woman who emigrates from Britain to the United States with her adventurous sister, Grace, after deep personal disappointment. Her sister is to marry Adam Cox, a British Quaker who has settled in a village in Ohio. After a horrendous ocean voyage, the sisters arrive in the United States, and Grace unexpectedly dies, leaving Honor stranded in a foreign and seemingly inhospitable land, where “flowers look different … even when they have the same name.”

Honor is able to rely on her fine sewing and quilting skills to earn her keep with a small-town milliner, Belle Mills, until her sister’s fiancé can come for her. But Honor is a woman of principle and order, and later finds the living arrangement with Adam and his recently widowed sister-in-law, Abigail, insufferable.

In the end, she has little choice: She must return to England or marry. And the pickings are indeed slim in rural Ohio. In spite of an undeniable attraction to Donovan, a bad-boy slave hunter, Honor marries into an influential Quaker family, but with some reservations.

In 1850, Ohio was a free state. Yet, slave-hunters crisscrossed the state, capturing fugitive slaves for the generous bounties. In addition, whites were prohibited by law from harbouring or protecting runaways. However, an estimated 40,000 slaves made their escape to Canada through Ohio, where there was a network of approximately 700 safe houses, or “depots” as they were known in the Underground Railroad, with the Quakers playing a crucial role.

Honor’s in-laws are abolitionists, but because of past tragedy, they refuse to break the law to help anyone on the run. Honor, nevertheless, finds that she is incapable of refusing assistance to those who appear at the farm, and becomes involved in the Underground Railroad.

The Last Runaway is a fast-paced, satisfying read, with Chevalier continually adding riveting details to keep the narrative rolling. There is some particularly insightful writing about the traditional art of quilt-making, which is on par with Chevalier’s writing on fossils in Remarkable Creatures. In fact, thorough research appears to be the hallmark of her work, lending it greater credibility and depth.

Most impressive is her credible yet subtle flair for signalling the presence of fugitive slaves. I found myself backtracking to find out exactly how she did it. Honor has, Chevalier writes, “an inner barometer that measured the change in the surrounding area, as one senses the air swelling before a thunderstorm. … People’s being gave off a kind of cold heat.”

As in Girl With a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures, the novelist presents strong women characters who are not afraid to take action. While fiction can always use more heroines with agency, I much preferred the plain-spoken, gun-toting Belle Mills to Honor. Honor’s harsh judgment of her new country and its people at times bordered on annoying self-righteousness. She was perhaps not the most flexible candidate for emigration. Nevertheless, I am curious to see how her character will be greeted on the other side of the Atlantic when The Last Runaway is released in Britain in March. And will British readers buy such an American tale?

For anyone interested in the Underground Railroad and the Pre-Civil War era, The Last Runaway is well worth your book-buying buck.

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Review of The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder

Review of The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder

The Juliet Stories

Carrie Snyder

House of Anansi

Recently short-listed for this year’s Governor General’sAward for literature, The Juliet Stories is the most recent work by Carrie Snyder. This novel-in-stories spans the life of Juliet from the tender age of 10 to adulthood. The eldest of three children, Juliet is the daughter of naive left-wing parents who uproot their family from Indiana and go to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas fight the Reagan-backed Contras in the early 1980s. The well-intentioned father, however, is much more interested in fighting alongside the Sandinistas in el campo than helping his wife and young family get acclimatized to the new language and culture. But Juliet’s father is not the only one with his focus elsewhere. Although her mother, Gloria, is busy with her family and chasing down a toddler, it appears that she would rather be strumming her guitar and showing off her beautiful singing voice at adult parties than being a mom. Gloria is quick to pass on some of her parenting responsibilities to the eldest Juliet, something that the daughter resents.

The three children slowly adjust to their new life in Nicaragua, but Juliet is always an outsider at school, or the girl who has the unladylike habit of sweating and throwing like a boy in gym class. There is a constant stream of Roots for Justice volunteers arriving from the United States to continue the struggle, and her father gets a little too involved with a few. The family endures some harrowing experiences which include being stopped by a group of armed men in the hills and having their car stolen. This is around the time that the family discovers that Juliet’s brother Keith has cancer. The father stays behind to fight for the cause, while the rest of the family goes to live with the paternal grandmother in southwestern Ontario, where the brother undergoes treatment. Juliet is again an outcast at her new school, as she comes to terms with her brother’s illness and the fact that he is the exclusive focus of her mother’s attention. In the years that follow, the family disintegrates, and the parents move on to new partners.

Carrie Snyder has beautifully captured what many North Americans feel while living abroad as ex-pats, negotiating the invisible cultural lines only to find that in spite of their best intentions, integration and acceptance are part of a long complicated process. The entire family is marked by their experience in the Central American country, and it is where Gloria chooses to remarry, an event that Juliet finds exceedingly awkward. Throughout the book, Snyder gives an accurate depiction of the complexity and often contradictory emotions of mother-daughter relationships, possibly the book’s strongest point. When Gloria says that she cannot sing at her own wedding ceremony, Juliet does not buy the statement. “Parse the words, are any of them truthful, or would each sentence make better sense read in a mirror? Gloria is not a nervous woman; she has an icy reserve, a chill that permits her freedom to pursue, to leave, to choose at will, with control. She thrives on performance.” Yet, later at the reception when Gloria actually does sing and play her guitar, Juliet “experiences a shot behind the eyes, a burst of pride at her mother’s unexpected accomplishments.”

Fortunately, Juliet does not heap all her anger and blame onto her mother. The daughter is able to forgive her mother’s lack of attention when she discovers that she is pregnant after a one-night stand. Juliet learns from her aunt that she, too, was initially an unwanted pregnancy. Her father is more the target of Juliet’s wrath. After his death, the adult daughter wants to torch the farmhouse, the last place the entire family lived together. 

Carry Snyder is someone we’re bound to hear more of in the future. She is a writer's writer. Her razor-sharp prose is insightful and rich throughout, but the stories set in Nicaragua are by far the best. This is the perfect book for anyone who has lived or traveled in Latin America or who is simply curious about what it was like to have revolutionary parents in the early 1980s. 

This review was cross-posted at Rover Arts.

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